Winner of the Stanner Award, 2013.

In this award-winning work Carlson explores the complexities surrounding Aboriginal identity today. Drawing on a range of historical and research literature, interviews and surveys, The politics of identity explores Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings of Aboriginality and the way these are produced and reproduced across a range of sites and contexts.

Carlson points to the multiple, yet narrow definitions of Aboriginal identity that have existed throughout Australia's colonial history and its continuing impact upon contemporary Aboriginal identities. Emphasising Indigenous debates and claims about Aboriginality, The politics of identity explores both the community and external tensions around appropriate measures of identity and the pressures and effects of identification.

An analysis of online Indigenous communities on social media that have emerged as sites of contestation adds to the growing knowledge in this area, both nationally and globally. This is a brave and personal contribution to the often vexed subject of Aboriginal identity and offers a distinctive and fresh line of analysis.

Production Details

• Paperback
• 230mm x 155mm x 18mm
• 256pp
• Released February 2016
• ISBN 9781925302134

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE
Chapter 1: Constructing the Aborigine
Chapter 2: Positioning ‘part-Aboriginal’ people
Chapter 3: Challenging the colonial Aborigine
Chapter 4: Quantifying Aboriginality by acculturation, adaptation and allegiance
Chapter 5: The changing meaning of Aboriginal identity
Chapter 6: Shifts in the social and political context
Chapter 7: Discovering and reconstructing Aboriginal identity
Chapter 8: Beyond the discourse
PART TWO
Chapter 9: Confirmation of Aboriginality
Chapter 10: Conflict, community and the regulation of Aboriginal identity
Chapter 11: Community discourse on the Confirmation of Aboriginality and Aboriginal identity- a case study
Chapter 12: Researching the politics of identity
Chapter 13: Identity journeys- when Aboriginal heritage was always known
Chapter 14: Identity journeys: discovering Aboriginal heritage
Chapter 15: The continuing contest over the definition of Aboriginal identity
Chapter 16: Learning and performing an Aboriginal identity
Chapter 17: Tensions at the cultural interface
Chapter 18: Aboriginal identity, community and social media
Concluding remarks
References
Index